talk

Or Gallery Berlin is pleased to present Daniel Colucciello Barber in Can Unpossessed Knowledge Fabulate Without Speculation, for the ninth in our speaker series ‘Inclinations’ hosted by Patricia Reed.

One encounters with increasing frequency the claim that thinking must be of and from reality, or that thinking must do without the correlation between subject and reality. Barber’s talk agrees with this claim but challenges another, associated claim: that thinking without correlation requires conversion to thinking that is speculative.

This challenge is presented through discussion of “unpossessed knowledge,” which draws on various sources (Laruelle, Deleuze, Afropessimism, Gnosticism). Unpossessed knowledge refuses correlation not only between subject and reality, but also between past and future, and ultimately between speculation and aesthetics. For unpossessed knowledge, thinking is only ever fabulation: thought that does without both correlation and speculation.

Daniel Colucciello Barber
is a Fellow at the ICI Berlin. He is the author of Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-Secularism and the Future of Immanence (Edinburgh UP, 2014) and On Diaspora: Christianity, Religion, and Secularity (Cascade, 2011), as well as contributing co-author of Dark Nights of the Universe ([NAME], 2013). His work, which has appeared in various journals and volumes, is presently focused on the idea of conversion.

The presentation of work revolves around the posing of a question that is the thrust of a guest’s activities. It goes without saying that questions may not be answered, but are grappled with in their unresolvability. An inclination is the force of attraction to a question (without a straightforward response), yet also to each other, as a community who partakes in a common quest(ion).
Hosted by Patricia Reed

Arriving at a question is already a departure.

Questions are a declaration of departure.

Arriving at a question in thought or activity is also the creation of a trajectory, of inclining oneself towards an unknown goal, yet not without direction.

A question inclines a departure in a particular way, but a question itself is generic – it propels all modes of seeking some thing. Questions possess the force of bending and swerving ideas/action.

A question is the confrontation and departure from a lack. To arrive at a question is to arrive at a gap in knowledge, action and speech – a gap that cannot be immediately filled in without the inclination towards something other.

A question is indisciplinary; the inclining magnetism of a question knows no disciplinary bounds.

In Kooperation mit der Botschaft von Kanada/In collaboration with the Embassy of Canada.